Wampum

Ethan's wanted to go to the District for a long time. It is why he came to Maine. Someday he'd get through the muni-maze, and with Charlie Harlow's help in the famously broken election 1999 election he made it on to the Portland city council long enough to make a theatrical gesture of "stepping aside", when Jack Dawson appealed Charlie & co's gift of 35 ballots, which was enough to get him into Ann Rand's Senate seat when she term-limited, always "fighting for Portland", because some day the safe seat in the 1st CD would open up. Someday someone would move on, up, out or die, and start the feast of movable chairs, to the Senate or to the Blaine House, but most of all, from Portland to Capital Hill. Funny, when Bob Masse was designing this poster Ethan was just another guy from away who'd lost his break-in race. Now he's talking dirty to the woman who gave John Baldacci the Blaine House and fell on the Party sword to be the symbolic candidate against Susan Collins in the first election after 9/11 made every Republican a Hero, after spending almost as many years in Augusta as Michael Brennan.

I'm a Californian, married to a Mainiac, and the parent of Mainacs. Abenaki Mainiacs. When Ronnie moved from Sacramento to Washington we were really glad in California -- we'd finally gotten rid of an idiot -- the seen-one-tree-seen-em-all guy. So maybe it a good thing that Ethan is trying to leave Maine.

But what is the weirdest way you can think of to celebrate Earth Day? Torching a heap of tires to liberate those poor carbon atoms imprisoned in the harsh bonds of expropriated tropical rubber?

Try messaging that Emily's List, the PAC created to get more women elected, is just a PAC, and a clean candidate doesn't take money from any PAC.

Because there's no connection between business as usual, and all the privileges that go with inherited wealth, and inherited sex, and inherited skin color, and what is wrong with the Earth.

And Mainers should vote against any woman unfortunate enough to run with Emily's List's advice (and girl do they have wicked good political advice to offer) and their money. Because its From Away. And Ethan isn't. Sort of.